To cleanse the palate, a watershed moment in celebrity public service announcements. This is simultaneously the most trivial, and most useful, PSA to come out of Hollywood in decades.

And it’s not annoying! Until today I couldn’t have imagined what it’d be like to watch an A-list actor speak didactically about a Matter of Concern and not come away highly irritated. “When’s he going to get to the part about climate change or impeaching Trump?” I kept thinking.

Answer - Factory - Settings - OLED

Never. The answer is never. He’s too busy worrying about the factory settings on your OLED.

Everyone knows what he’s talking about, I assume, because new HDTVs are now so cheap that virtually everyone has one or will soon. The “motion-smoothing” feature is what makes film look like live television. Film is shot at 24 frames per second; motion-smoothing adds frames artificially to “smooth” out the image. The result is actually crisper and more true-to-life than film is. But there’s a problem. When you’re using it to watch film, the picture on the screen is a distortion of what the director intended you to see. Imagine watching “The Godfather” through a filter that makes it look live or video-recorded. That’s not Coppola’s vision. That’s Samsung’s vision.

Somehow - Experience - Minds - Decades - Experience

Which would be fine, I guess, if motion-smoothing somehow improved the film-viewing experience. It doesn’t. Our minds have been trained through decades of experience to interpret 24 frames per second as “what film looks like.” Mess with that and it takes...